Alix: Nothing matters but love—and Midtown East

It is possible I hate spring because it is beautiful. 

Because it demands, prepotent, that I live it to the fullest. That I absorb it and let it feed my soul, or my imagination—both of which often feel so undernourished—but I never can. 

Because it comes back yearly, as sure as the passing of time, and yearly it exists as the outer manifestation of all I wish I were but am not: bursting, daring, irresistible.

Spring stirs me in ways that I can’t handle; I find it unbearable in its being pleasant to the point of frenzy. Morning blue skies accelerate my heartbeat to the brink of tears—of confusion, loneliness, expectations, and all the other things that tears are for, including beauty.

Summer—slow, sluggish summer—always comes to the rescue. Except that time it did not, in 2016. 

My springtime struggle that year turned into a longer unrest. Days got longer, then longest, and then shorter again. By mid July my life wasn’t but a fight against bouts of overwhelming restlessness. I would see them coming, on days when nothing was wrong, the way you see a fog bank come toward you on a highway, and you can’t but drive straight into it, petrified and lost already. And though you know, that fog banks end, that proceeding with great caution you will make it out just fine, they feel eternal as you cross them.

The cramps that controlled my mind would ease later in the day, and so I found myself often spending evenings in the office: Trying to focus and write, put up some kind of fight with my daily failure to accomplish anything. 

On one such evening in late July I started the longest romantic relationship I have had in New York so far—although both romantic and relationship are not quite the right terms. 

I have learned in my many years observing the way people manage to make love happen, and stay, that often they keep potential interests in their orbit—charming acquaintances who might one day turn into romance, flings that didn't exhaust their potential, poorly timed affairs that could have been, and still could.

I don’t have something like that in my life. But what I have is: Freddie. 

I had met Freddie online months before that July; none of his photos showed his full face, but in one he was a dark silhouette cast against the background of an Amalfi Coast view I adore. That's definitely not enough to decide to like someone—maybe nothing ever is, but this really is too little—but it was a time of confusion, during which I often swiped right by accidents, hoping that I might eventually end up calling one such accident "fate."

Anyway, he and I politely exchanged vacuous and sporadic small talk for months, often while traveling outside the city or the country, and never made real plans to meet. Until one late afternoon his message asking me if I wanted to meet for a drink found me at my desk, really keen on doing anything other than failing to distract my brain from obsessing over all the ways in which I was failing. So I said yes! 

It took a bit of back and forward to figure out where to meet. He was on 58th and 1st, and wanted to meet close to his apartment, I was on 23rd and 6th and not up for that, so we eventually met at an unremarkable bar in Union Square. It was a warm summer evening and the 2016 electoral campaign was in full swing, I remember because we had agreed to cut the date short so we could go to our respective homes and watch a debate that was on that night. 

Freddie was nice and good looking. We had a pleasant time talking about politics and America, our love for travel, and I missed half of what he said to me because his deep voice got lost in the cacophony of the place, and there's only so many times you can ask someone to please repeat what they just said—I'm sorry, once again? 

When we left the bar, he insisted on walking me to the subway station—in part, he said, because he hadn’t been to that part of town in forever. 

We said goodbye with some customary promise to do it again soon. And, mainly because it was very nice not to be completely stuck in my head for a minute, plus I truly am so awkward at the end of a date, I kissed him. 

He was very glad that I kissed him. He kept reminding me I did so as we texted our way toward our second date, which made me feel self-conscious in a way easily mistakable for personal growth. We settled on a day and time, maybe about ten days after that first evening, but something came up, namely Freddie's utter inability to make plans.

Admittedly, I was not particularly invested, and so I never accepted his subsequent occasional invites to meet him within a few hours at some bar on 58th and 1st, which is literally where he lives, a place which is very far away from anywhere I am ever at. Also, as a matter of principle: no. 

Freddie didn’t mind that I declined his offer—he always understood it was not ideal—and we rescheduled to another time soon, and then another. Then another still. Almost four years since we first got in touch, Freddie texted me out of the blue, once every six to nine months, to reschedule our date. 

I never say no. I also never take the lead on setting a time, or place. 

I do not, to be clear, want to date Freddie, and I actually don’t think he does me. But it is fun to explore all the ways in which I can say yes and yet still know it won’t happen: Typically, I would reply to his text saying I can’t meet him that day, but maybe sometimes the following week? Other times, we even agree on a date and decide to finalize the time and place closer to the day. Months will go by before his follow-up.

One time he came through and I had to go nuclear: I suggested we meet in Brooklyn instead of that bar he likes on 58th and 1st. I knew he would ask to reschedule, because getting more than a few subway stops from his neighborhood is Freddie's kryptonite.

Has Freddie only ever ventured outside Midtown East that one time to meet me in Union Square? It is a possibility I wouldn't dismiss, and find quite flattering to contemplate.

Still, our commitment to this non-commitment makes me feel like we invented some kind of surrealist dating genre.

Freddie wishes me happy holidays, and sometimes checks in with me about affecting news, like the death of Anthony Bourdain. He is the only man to have wished me on Valentine’s day since I have been in New York. He messaged me at the beginning of the lockdown, just to see how I was doing. I was glad to hear he was healthy staying home. 

At this point, meeting would break the spell: Freddie and I, I have a feeling, are not a good match; what is a perfectly dysfunctional, ongoing waltz of the absurd would end up yet another random online dating story that didn’t work out. 

I think we deserve better. I would like our dance to continue.

Maybe one day I will have to reply to Freddie’s message that I have left New York. That I have a partner, or children, a family. I think he would be happy for me. 

But for now, things for me aren’t so different from the last time we met, almost four years ago. I still live in Brooklyn. Never go to 58th and 1st. We are still on for our second date. Spring has come once again, except this time it hasn’t hit me quite so hard: I go out once a day, alone, and I jog in isolation by my home, stopping often to look at the plants; I need them more than I do my stamina. 

Turns out, there's such relief in this lockdown. Is it my fault that I am lazy, if there’s nowhere I can go? Or that I put on weight, if nobody can see it? Or that I am alone, if I can’t meet anyone? 

There's nothing I can do but be patient—including with spring, including with myself.

🎨 "The life of any plant is merely the effort to capture sunlight and breathe it into the mineral flesh of our planet; each plant works to make the Earth similar to a star." (Emanuele Coccia)

Odilon Redon, Marguerites (1901):
 

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💃: Lilies of the Valley, Jun Miyake. Choreography by Pina Bausch:

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🎼: The lyrics of Ryuichi Sakamoto's fullmoon are an excerpt from Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, repeated in many languages, one blending into the other.

"How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply part of your being that you can't ever consider your life without it?"


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🌿: A key feature of British landscape gardens is providing two paths for the visitor to travel on—one for the eye, and one for the feet. Getting to what you see in front of your eyes always requires a bit of a detour.

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🖋️: Salvatore Quasimodo, S'Udivano Stagioni Aeree Passare (1930) (excerpt):

S'udivano stagioni aeree passare
nudità di mattini,
labili raggi urtarsi.

(You could hear aerial seasons pass through
nakedness of mornings,
fleeting rays clashing.)


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🌸: Magnolias are some of the oldest trees on Earth. They are older than bees—at least 95 million years old. Their thick, large flower petals have evolved so that they could be pollinated by beetles without being damaged by their tough wings. 
 

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🎥: Michelangelo Antonioni was born in Ferrara, as city as foggy as it is pretty. That is why, I think, his films show life is like a fog bank: sometimes it can descend on you, at once gentle and confusing, and when it lifts everything is right where and how it was before—only slightly more unsettling.

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🐰: Bunny drawing by Roger Wu.


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💖: If you enjoyed Alix, please share it with someone you love.